


Free Agent

by FaiaHae, VigilantShadow



Series: Red Data Hunters Guild [2]
Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast), The Adventure Zone: Amnesty (Podcast)
Genre: AU of an AU, Domestic AU kinda?, F/F, F/M, M/M, Pairings and characters TBA when they become relevant, Pining lots of pining from several different people, Team as Family, monster hunting, slowburn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-09
Updated: 2019-04-09
Packaged: 2020-01-07 03:52:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18402557
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FaiaHae/pseuds/FaiaHae, https://archiveofourown.org/users/VigilantShadow/pseuds/VigilantShadow
Summary: In the Kepler that was, Leo Tarkesian gave up on monster hunting to run a grocery store. In the Kepler that was, Victoria died and left Ned to run something which was a museum, and only a museum. In the Kepler that was, Agent Stern doesn't get to town until October, 2018.In the Kepler that was, the members of the Red Data Hunters Guild followed proper protocol and went dark after one of their members stopped checking in. In the Kepler that is, Barclay couldn't stop himself from panicking. Just a little.(A canon divergent sequel to the fic Loaded Language)





	Free Agent

Indrid sat cross-legged in the center of his lumpy motel room mattress, the warmth of his laptop resting across his legs the only thing keeping him from shivering too badly. It wasn’t the motel’s air conditioning - which he was tempted to break, both for the noise and the chill air, on top of the fact that he couldn’t turn it off - it was the futures settling in front of his eyes.

He clenched his jaw, chasing one down the rabbit hole. It ended with Leo Tarkesian lying on the steps of a tall telescope, eyes wide open as his blood seeped out of a hole in his stomach and onto the hands of a man Indrid had seen in countless visions. Not ideal, for so many reasons. Not the least of which that...well. Indrid tried to be objective- it had been drilled into him as the court seer in Sylvaine to not bother with  _ happiness.  _ The weight of lives and future generations was a heavy one. It was a responsibility he was not allowed to neglect in favor of his quality of life or anyone else's. Still, Indrid saw. He saw all roads lead to his heart, his own soulmate, if he believed in that sort of thing. He tried to keep moving towards his own happiness. To move toward his love’s happiness. His love holding Leo as he bled to death twisted him up far more than he cared to admit.  Duck Newton deserved the world, and Indrid would do whatever he could to give it to him. 

There was another, close to that one but with Leo on his feet and talking to Duck in a low voice. Better, that was better. He backtracked along it, to the lodge he’d caught sight of in almost as many visions as he had Duck. The kitchen was empty. The kitchen had always been empty. Indrid had a feeling that wasn’t for value-neutral reasons, and so he shoved it away from him as well.

He knew he was just wasting time, putting off the matter at hand. These were all visions from so very far away. The hand he might play in their conception would not come for years, and so he blinked them away and focused on the choice directly ahead.

He looked up, locking eyes with his own reflection in the cracked mirror hanging from the closet. Only his face was visible in the dark, lit up by his laptop screen. The light cast his shadows across his cheeks and made him look as tired as he felt. His glasses shone in that same light, and as Indrid squinted he could see the reflection of the computer screen staring back to him. So very small. He couldn’t read it like this, but in the visions it was all he could see.

The  _ new thread _ screen was burnt into all the futures before him. In all of them, the cursor drifted its way to the  _ submit post  _ button. In some of them, he eventually clicked it.

If he hit send on the post he had written, his future would settle into one, ugly truth. The FBI would see it, and he would flee before they found this motel room and before they found the next. But eventually, he would be caught, and they would pin his wings to some prison wall like a moth in an entomologist’s study. He wouldn’t die, and eventually the future would fracture open again and in some of  _ those  _ futures he escaped. It would hurt, though.

The future would settle for everyone that this post was intended for, as well. They would all go to ground. Which, granted, they all did in most futures. But in this one, the holes they dove into wouldn’t be graves, not for a long time at least. In fact, they’d be more than alive. They’d be safe. Indrid followed that future forward, and the worlds where Leo Tarkesian died long before he could lay bleeding on those steps, where the kitchen of Amnesty Lodge stood empty and The Cryptonomica was never built, all melted and reshaped themselves into one timeline which he could never be part of. They’d all be safe.

Well, except for the last of them, the reason this post ended with  _ I’m so sorry _ . He wished he could say he hadn’t seen this coming, but in fact the opposite was true. He’d seen this moment coming, but never how to stop it. Maybe he should have looked harder. 

The future where he hit send didn’t have the fifth member of the Red Data Hunter’s Guild in it. It tunneled down to one town in West Virginia, and only Leo, Barclay, and Victoria ever went there.

Three out of five, safe. One out of five alive, but without much else to show for it. The last vanished from Indrid’s sight forever. That was a sixty-percent success rate. Technically a win.

If he didn’t hit send, it was everyone’s game. There might be no more posts on the forum, or all of them might say something and he wouldn’t be the only one who was caught in the trap. Maybe they posted, but the realization something had gone wrong set in in time for them to escape. Usually, at least one of them died  _ badly.  _

In most of them, the fifth never came to Kepler, West Virginia. In many of the ones where he did, well…

_ You lose your way.  _ That was what Indrid had told him, nine years ago. It turned out that sticking around had changed very little. There was the flash of a gun, pointed at someone’s head.

Indrid saw all of the likely futures shift to accommodate him grimacing. In half of them he gave in to the urge to scream. In some he slammed his laptop shut, burrowed into the blankets, and pretended he didn’t exist. 

In this timeline, he took a deep breath and managed to swallow the noise, because  _ maybe  _ it wouldn’t all end badly. There were a small fistfulll of timelines where things worked out; there were worlds where he went to Kepler and all four of the other hunters were already there and happy and he had the privilege of telling them that they’d been friends online for so many years before they met in person. These were timelines where the future stood uncertain, but he could see ways to step in and hold everything together. 

One hundred percent success. Five out of five. Was he thinking of risking it in the hopes of saving all of them, or because in every one of those futures  _ Indrid  _ ended up in Kepler?

A new timeline appeared, startling Indrid out of his thoughts as it crystalized. The far future remained its normal, branching self, but the next few years settled into something definite. He closed out of the window and examined the new thread which had appeared at the top of the board.

 

📃THREAD: somethings wrong

_ Started by  _ 🗨 _ Bbearthebartender, last post by  _ 🗨 _ Bbearthebartender “Ok, so, don’t panic, but Stanley’s gone dark. I really shouldn’t post this because someone’s probably listening now, but I have to tell you all that…” _

 

Indrid smiled, the shadows stretching the expression into something more menacing than he’d intended. Then he shut the laptop and the motel plunged into darkness. The future wasn’t certain, but Indrid Cold knew one thing:

That perfect future was coming, and much sooner than he could have hoped.


End file.
